Reviews

Pitfall: The Lost Expedition

Once you leap onto a trademark vine rope, the shoulder buttons shift your direction 360 degrees, and analog-stick swinging really captures the feeling of wobbling at the top of a jungle rope. Immersive elements are everywhere: You don't just press a button to activate a lever that opens a gate -- you use the analog stick to shift Harry in the direction you want to tug that lever. You can save at any time, and the load of that game brings you back to the start of each chamber you last entered. That's not to say you won't be returning to areas a number of times, but cheap replay is low on the list of included gameplay features. Should you plummet into a bottomless pit, you'll only lose a health, and appear on the platform you just leapt from. You hear that, Lara Croft?

The game is spent collecting idols (distant cousins of the Gyroids from Animal Crossing), purchasing extra moves and hints from a snoozing shaman, and locating trapped explorers. The maximum number of idols? 138. The reason for this arbitrary number? Unknown. The other 50 percent of the game? Finding a variety of items equipped using your D-pad. These include water bottles for extra health, Zelda-esque slings to knock out enemies and switches you can't physically reach, torches, and even pickaxes to clamber up moguls in the final obligatory icy zone of the game.

Leopards, Gorillas, and Stereotypical Natives!

Nice crocodile, please don't eat me... again.

Many of the branching pathways are blocked (requiring a certain item in order to pass through), so you'll have a constant progression and regression, locating an item and backtracking to use it at a spot you glanced out hours earlier. This isn't cumbersome, but will annoy those with attention deficit disorder. And, if you tire of the 3D platforming, there's always a hidden chamber with a gigantic cobweb-filled stone Atari 2600 to plug Pitfall 1 and 2 into; a couple of extra game goodies.

The not overly impressive environments feature jungles, lava, and ice but strangely no horribly-lit sewer levels in Paris. Every nook, cranny, and platform has been positioned so that you'll reach it if your depth-perception and button-tapping techniques are all functioning. Enemies never take more than a health point, and despite being your usual collection of jungle foes (alligators, gorillas, stereotypical natives, and er penguins), each have their own weakness to exploit. But it's the vertigo-inducing leaps over bottomless chasms, the lack of camera control issues, and ability to race through the game or leisurely collect every idol that separates this from the platforming pack.

Potential Pitfalls

The ten percent of the game that Edge of Reality got so very wrong? The characters, script, and map functionality. A frightening super-deformed version of Harry stars as the hero, made into a hapless horn-dog without the Bruce Campbell tongue-in-cheek underpinnings (that's right folks, this is an anime-dubbing sound-alike. Who's laughing now? Not the legions of Bruce fans). Added to this insult is a script so shockingly banal it makes Bad Boys II look like Hemingway (sample "funny" dialog: "I'm going to find a squirrel. You two are nuts."), and a talking Leopard that serves as little else than a comic foil (who produces such tragically un-hip lines as "whassup?!!"), that you'd think Edge of Reality drafted in Carrot Top to finish up the in-game conversations after it fired Paulie Shore. Other potential (wait for it) pitfalls to watch out for? It takes three button presses every time you want to check the map. Most of the game isn't going to tax anyone who's managed 100 percent on Maximo: Ghosts to Glory. And the "natives" sound either French or Mexican, or French and Mexican. But that's it. In a world where Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines gets released, however, this is really nitpicking.

This always happens.

If you're looking for any differences between the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube versions of Pitfall: The Lost Expedition, then good luck finding any. The game seems to have been tailored to the PlayStation 2's architecture, and Harry controls just as well on any of the three versions. The PlayStation 2 build slows down ever-so-slightly when there's loads of stuff moving at once (like when you're kicking down tribal stone columns), and there's slightly coarser environmental effects (like mist) than the other two. Control is dead-on with all three consoles. You're not getting a high-definition video option, though; just Dolby Pro-Logic II sound to switch on and off. The Xbox offers 480 progressive scan, but only Dolby Digital, while the GameCube has 480 PS and Pro Logic II.

In the end, though, Pitfall: The Lost Expedition remains the centerpiece of any self-respecting platforming game fan's library no matter what system they possess ... while Prince of Persia is being borrowed, and Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy is lost down the back of the sofa. What more of a recommendation do you need?